Black lettering tattoo reading a quote in a handwritten script, running along the inner forearm.

Quote in script along a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single line of black text runs along a pale forearm, reading "To die would be an awfully big adventure" in a handwritten, slightly uneven script. The lettering is solid black with crisp edges and no shading, set against a soft, dark fabric background. The line sits diagonally across the frame, filling most of the width of the forearm.

Lettering Forearm Quote Text Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Dai had the book from the Institute library before the siren had finished wailing for the Hollis shift. He sat on the step of the lamp room with the pages tipped to the grey light, reading Peter Pan aloud because I could not yet make the letters stand in a row by myself. "To die would be an awfully big adventure," he read, then spat neatly away from the step, the way he did when a sentence annoyed him.

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Mam said he was not to read me such things in a village where the pit took a man most months, but Dai said a boy ought to know what the words were for before they came looking for him. He kept his own tally in chalk on the side of the coal bunker, one tick for every roof fall he had walked out from under. Forty-one ticks by the spring. Nobody in Callow Bank counted them out loud, but everybody knew the number, the way you know the weight of a bucket by lifting it.

The morning the Hollis seam came down, Dai did not come up with the cage. The men who did come up stood at the bunker a long while without speaking, and then Mam sent me to fetch the book from under his pillow. I read the line myself that night, slowly, with my finger under each word, and it did not sound brave the way Dai had made it sound. It sounded like a boy who had got tired of counting.

I took the chalk to the bunker before school. I did not add a tick. I wrote the line along the black wood in letters that leaned the wrong way, the way his always had, and I left the clock on the lamp room wall going on behind me as it always did.